Salt Burn Move On
by orsa-verba
Summary: Haunted houses are mostly bull. Sometimes they aren't. Quentin Beck knows that, so he comes prepared. Haunted houses are mostly bull. Unfortunately for Peter Parker, this one isn't. [ SPN AU ] [ Pre-QuinPeter / Spiderio ]


Urban legends about haunted houses were mostly embellishment with a few dull facts sprinkled in. To get passed around a community a story needed to be good, and that meant it needed mystery and ambiance. It was always better when there was murder, mystique and a raving lunatic at the center of it all. Usually, it was a load of horse shit.

Every now and then though, you really did run into some psychotic bastard who took an axe to his whole family.

In the back of his mind, Quentin always sort of hoped it was an exaggeration that brought him into town. Sure, hunting something that didn't exist was a waste of time, but on the flip side he never had to walk into a room and find a dead body. Hunting may be a thrill, but he'd take a ghost story over a dead teenager any day.

So far, he'd found two corpses since entering the Bradshaw house. The remains in front of him made three.

Quentin knelt beside the body and checked his pulse, like that would change the fact that one of his arms was barely attached and his chest had a gaping hole in it. When he didn't find one, he lifted bloody fingers and shut the young man's lightless eyes.

"Stupid kid." he sighed. "Should've stayed home."

He stood up and reached into one of his coat's inner pockets, retrieving a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches. A pouch of salt from his belt was dumped over the body, followed by the accelerant, then the matches.

Back in the day, Quentin would have hesitated before dropping the first match. He'd stare down at the cooling body of what amounted to a child, barely out of high school, and feel numbness creeping over him. Sometimes, they just looked like they were sleeping. They were presentable for an open casket. He'd debate leaving them be.

That hesitation had gone after his first encounter with a freshly raised spirit. Now it was all routine.

Salt.

Burn.

Move on.

Quentin shut the door on the burning body and stepped back into the main hall. He was making steady progress. The first body had been in the dining room, right off the entryway in the front hall, which had led him up the stairs to the second floor and subsequent corpses. A quick glance at his watch said he was making good time. Sunrise was a long way off.

There were four floors to the Bradshaw brownstone, the fourth being a wine cellar accessible only through the kitchen. Legend had it that Bradshaw Sr., having just hacked his family to bits, took a piece of each of them down to the cellar and hid them under a flagstone. Quentin's plan had been to get in and go right for the cellar, find the stone, burn the remains and be done.

Unfortunately, where there was one fresh body, there tended to be more. Who knew how many stupid kids had ended up in here tonight, only to get themselves butchered like the Bradshaw family?

Searching the house was made simpler by the pendant around Quentin's neck. The faintly glowing blue stone was a talisman meant to obscure his presence. A momento from the man who taught him everything about hunting. As long as he wore it and didn't draw attention to himself, he was as good as invisible to the ghosts of the house.

The next two rooms he came across were in disarray, but without bodies. Quentin continued on to the stairs leading to the third floor, careful to tread on the moldy rug to muffle his footsteps as much as possible. He had almost reached the top when his breath began to fog and a chill rattled down his spine. He stilled, holding his breath.

The figure of a girl in a pale blue nightgown appeared at the top of the stairs, moving from left to right. Her head lolled from side to side unnaturally as she walked, like it could fall off at any moment. Small hands, sticky with blood, trailed along the banister as she passed.

Quentin frowned. He had been expecting to run into Bradshaw Sr. at some point tonight, but the apparition before him looked like Mary Bradshaw, the older of the two Bradshaw daughters. She had been a victim of her father's, the same as her sister, mother, aunt and infant brother.

"Now what are _you_ doing here..." he murmured under his breath, following with his eyes as she continued to amble along.

It wasn't uncommon for the restless spirit of a deranged killer to keep one of their victims with them for "company", but little Mary didn't look all that frightened. She was humming, though he couldn't place the tune, and meandered along until she was well out of sight.

"Great." Quentin exhaled. "Axe wielding maniac plus creepy little girl. Can I get horror cliches for a thousand, Alex?"

At the top of the stairs, he went left.

A consistent chill froze the air on the third floor. It neither dipped nor weaved as a draft would, which confirmed that at least one of the Bradshaw ghosts was still present in the area. Quentin silently unsheathed his hunting knife and held it ready at his side, pacing slowly forward.

There were fewer rooms to search, as this floor was about half the size of the previous two. Quentin gingerly tried each door as he passed, finding one to be locked, the second empty and the third leading to a dumbwaiter. A shattered window at the end of the hall opened tauntingly onto the alley behind the brownstone.

_Look!_ it jeered. _A way out! Just jump three stories onto solid concrete!_

Quentin hesitated, then peered out of it. Nothing lay on the pavement below. Good.

One last door stood to his left. Quentin tested the handle, finding the door to be unlocked, and pushed it open with his shoulder. There was just enough time for him to sweep his eyes across the shadows of the room when something appeared in his periphery.

A decade of hunting had honed his survival instincts; he dropped his weight, ducked, and lashed out with his knife all in the same movement, before he'd even registered what was coming at him. It was a splintered piece of wood with a pair of nasty looking, rusted nails jammed through the business end.

Not an axe.

Not Bradshaw Sr.

Quentin twisted his wrist at the last moment and drove the hilt of his knife into a set of ribs. Someone yelped, he swore, and the shattered two-by-four dropped to the floor. Thinking fast, Quentin dropped his knife, grabbed at the stranger, and yanked them against himself.

A struggle ensued, which ended with the smaller, weaker person against his chest, Quentin's hand over his mouth.

"_Shhh!_" he hissed. "Shut up!"

The stranger froze. Together, they held their breath, straining their ears for the sound of footsteps. Quentin exhaled slowly, watching his breath form a fine, but almost transparent mist.

Minutes ticked by.

"Alright. I'm going to let you go. Don't. Run."

A nod, then Quentin removed himself from the stranger, allowing them to stumble away from him.

It was another teenage boy. He had chestnut curls and blood on his cheek, dried dark over pale skin. A digital camera was slung over his chest by a leather strap, which he clung to now that his hands were empty. Quentin had seen enough survivors in his day to know his type; either he was going to start blubbering, or there was steel behind those puppy brown eyes.

"Who are you?!" the young man demanded in a low whisper, hands going white knuckled.

"I could be asking you the same thing, kid." Quentin replied. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Peter." he said, after a moment's hesitation. "And I'm- I'm here on a... dare. Some guys from my school, they found out I'm interested in the paranormal and they kind of just..."

Quentin, having knelt to retrieve his knife, now stood, eyebrow cocked.

"Dragged you here?"

"Yeah."

"Jerks."

Peter attempted a weak smile, but lost it along with the remaining color in his face quickly.

"Did you see them when you came in?" he asked, almost begged. "There were three of them, the lead guy's name is Flash-"

Quentin didn't bother to mask his expression. Peter made a hysterical sound in the back of his throat.

"Oh my god, they're dead. They're dead, aren't they? I'm not crazy. I saw Bradshaw, with the axe, and he-"

Peter clapped a hand over his mouth.

Turning away, he fell against an overturned bookcase, using it to support himself as he heaved his last meal onto the floor. Quentin averted his eyes.

After several dry retches, Peter dragged a breath into his shaking body. To his credit, he collected himself with surprising grace, wiping his mouth with his sleeve as he pulled himself up straight. A few more breaths, then he turned back around.

Quentin regarded him for a moment before offering him the flask of whiskey he kept in his coat for the bad hunts. Ones like this one. Peter took it.

"For what it's worth, kid, I'm sorry." Quentin said.

Peter took two hearty swallows, then handed the flask back.

"They were jackasses," he rasped. "But they didn't deserve to _die_. Not like that."

"Few people do."

Another deep breath seemed to restore Peter's nerve.

"Your turn." he said. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

"Quentin Beck. As of now I'm here to stop them and, with any luck, save you."

"That's _really_ reassuring."

"Hey, I'm not saying you won't survive the night. Just that your chances are infinitely better if you follow my lead."

Peter's glare dropped to the knife held loosely in Quentin's hand.

"Can that hurt them?" he asked.

"Not like it could hurt you, but it'll make them flinch. Ghosts don't like iron." Quentin nodded to the plank Peter had swung at his head. "Those nails wouldn't have hurt ol' Bradshaw, but they would've bought you a few seconds."

"Got a spare?"

Right then, Quentin decided he liked Peter. There were a lot of ways to deal with death and the supernatural, and facing it head on wasn't usually people's first choice. It said something about a person if their instinct when faced with adversity was to fight back.

"No offense, kid, but you just tried to brain me with a two-by-four. I'm not giving you a knife."

"Whatever else you've got, then."

Quentin hesitated for a fraction of a second, then pulled the talisman from around his neck.

"Here." he said, looping the leather cord over Peter's head. "This will keep them from noticing you. Keep it on, try to stay quiet and they won't even notice you're there."

He had a gun, and there was in fact a spare knife, but he didn't have time to show Peter how to use either. That was the excuse running through his head, anyway. Quentin was still trying to process the act of taking the pendant off for the first time in over five years.

What the hell had possessed him to do that? His relationship with Stark may have been rocky, but the man had taught him everything he knew. Aside from being damn useful, the talisman _meant_ something to him. He'd met Peter less than fifteen minutes ago.

Yet, there it hung around his neck. Like it belonged there. Hell, it even went with his outfit.

Peter touched his fingers to the pendant, looking from it up at Quentin.

Like he could read his mind, Peter said; "I won't lose it."

Priorities had shifted. The Bradshaw murders were recent enough that it was hard to discern a pattern with their activity, which made them hard to hunt. And like any hunter worth their salt, Quentin was loathe to leave a hunt unfinished. That no longer mattered. His first priority was now to get Peter out and ensure his safety.

After a cursory glance to ensure the hallway remained empty, Quentin led his new companion back towards the stairs. The brownstone was quiet. The faint smell of burning meat drifted from from the floors below. Quentin hoped he was the only one to notice it.

They had just reached the top of the stairs when steam began to bloom from their mouths. Peter, who had started down the stairs before Quentin, abruptly stopped to stare wide eyed between the banisters down the hall where they'd come from.

Little Mary Bradshaw's eyes shone weirdly in the half-light, her gorey mouth split into a mockery of childish glee.

"_You're gonna diii~ie_..."

"Well," Quentin drawled, shifting his weight and raising his blade. "That's not a very nice thing to say."

"_Daddy's gonna _getcha_!_"

"Thanks for the warning. Now how about you run along and play?"

She was still advancing, head wobbling back and forth. From the front, it was apparent that she'd all but been decapitated, head balanced on her neck and held in place by a few stray bits of muscle and skin. Every time her head tilted, the wound gaped open.

There was blood all over her. _All_ over her. For someone who had been killed in bed, there was a lot of spatter on her night dress and face.

"Oh, hell." Quentin swore. "You little psycho. You helped your daddy, didn't you?"

Mary Bradshaw's face twisted into something almost inhuman, malice and bloodthirst overcoming the youthful facade. Her mouth fell open in an unhinged, gurgling scream. She vanished, only to reappear barely an inch from Quentin's face.

He'd anticipated it, and as soon as she came into focus he drove the blade of his knife up under her jaw and through her spectral tongue. Mary's eyes bulged in shock, horrible scream becoming one of pain as the iron dragged through her incorporeal form.

She disappeared in a shower of sparks and smoke.

"Go- _GO!_ She's not gonna stay gone for long!"

Peter needed no further encouragement to bolt down the stairs. Quentin followed, sheathing his knife and replacing it with his pistol. This turned out to be a good call, as Peter came to a dead stand-still at the second story landing.

Bradshaw Sr. was less than three feet from him, eyes unfocused. Since Peter had stopped moving, the talisman was doing its job.

Quentin didn't give the axe-carrying ghost time to find a new target for his rage. He plugged two iron rounds right through center mass, grabbed Peter's shoulder, and yelled at him to keep going.

They were off, down the second flight of stairs to the first floor. Again, they stopped, this time from disorientation as they tried to remember where the front door was. Peter found it first, yanking at Quentin's coat to get him moving in the right direction.

Predictably, just as they were about to make it, the door slammed shut. Every door slammed shut on either side of them, too, leaving them in a bottleneck with no escape.

Cold crept in on every side, sending shivers through them both as their panting breaths turned into smoke signals before their eyes. Two vicious spirits, both angry and hungry for the kill, and both coming for them. It looked like they had nowhere to go.

Of course, Quentin had a plan.

As soon as the door slammed shut he turned on his heel, putting himself between Peter and the ghost of Mary Bradshaw. She looked worse, more decayed, which made it even easier to put a bullet through her skull.

"This way!" Quentin snapped, reaching blindly behind himself for Peter.

Peter took his hand and ran to keep up as they fled through the brownstone.

Up was a recipe for disaster. They could just keep playing cat and mouse until the sun came up, but Quentin wasn't convinced he had enough bullets for that. Thankfully, there was still one avenue left open to them. The wine cellar.

Through the Bradshaw kitchen, tucked behind a dilapidated pantry, was the door to the cellar. Quentin didn't slow down, just threw his shoulder against it with all the force and momentum he could muster. He'd be feeling that tomorrow, for sure.

The door gave way, flying open to reveal a dark staircase to the brownstone's lowest level. Peter squeezed his hand. Quentin looked back in time to see both Bradshaw's manifesting in the center of the kitchen.

They didn't move.

Quentin dragged Peter down the stairs.

The wine cellar had seen better days. Actually, maybe it hadn't, it was hard to tell in the dark. Only vague light drifted in through two high windows leading onto the street, illuminating nothing yet creating a thousand shadows.

After almost five minutes in the dark and the silence, Quentin lowered his gun.

"...I don't think they're following."

"Why not?" Peter asked, voice steadier than Quentin had expected. He wasn't panicking. That was good.

"No idea. Doesn't matter, just works in our favor for now."

Peter exhaled loudly, thumping down on top of a crate behind him. Quentin joined him a moment later, mirroring his sigh. In the near-darkness, the pendant's blue glow showed just enough of Peter's face to see his relief.

A moment of silence passed, then Peter leaned against Quentin's shoulder. The hunter tensed at the sudden contact, but didn't pull away.

"You doing alright, kid?" he asked carefully.

"I'm seventeen." Peter mumbled. "And I'm... okay."

Okay. Well, all things considered, Quentin couldn't really ask for better than that at the moment. He relaxed and adjusted his posture so Peter could lean more heavily against him. It felt nice, having someone that close.

"You've got shit luck, Peter. Most haunted houses are just a bunch of stories some bored kids made up. You just happened to get dragged into one that wasn't."

Peter laughed weakly.

"Well, at least I know I'm not crazy for believing in this stuff now." he said, trying for upbeat and managing exhausted.

Belatedly, it registered in Quentin's mind that one of the corpses he'd burned had been someone who dragged Peter in here. On a _dare_. Three teens dead, one potentially traumatized, because of a dare.

"You must've really wanted to show that Flash guy." Quentin mused aloud.

There was a pregnant pause, during which Quentin wondered if he should have kept his mouth shut, before Peter spoke.

"He... He was always giving me crap in school. About everything. I mean, he's a bully. And when he found out I was obsessed with the paranormal he just wouldn't let it go."

"Sounds like a great guy."

"Oh yeah, he _sucked_." Peter said, bitterly. "God, I only said yes to get back at him. His friends were freaked about this place. I brought my camera to document "proof" of the haunting, but I was just going to get pics of them being scared of their own shadows and give them to the school paper."

Peter was shaking, though from what emotion Quentin couldn't be sure. Maybe it was just the adrenaline catching up with him.

Quentin put his arm around him in a silent gesture of comfort. Peter couldn't lean against him any more heavily than he already was, but he did shift closer.

"It seems so _stupid_ now. They're _dead_."

They lapsed into silence again. Quentin squeezed Peter's shoulders each time a tremor wracked his body, but said nothing to try and make him feel better. There was nothing to be said. It _was_ stupid, it _was_ senseless.

The watch on Quentin's wrist was digital, which meant that even in the dark he could read the time. Dawn was around six this time of year and they were just creeping past three. In a few hours, this nightmare would be over.

Peter was the one to pull away first. He sat up straight, leaving Quentin to remove his arm from his shoulders.

"Sorry, I needed to just-" he shook his head. "What now?"

It was tempting to pull Peter against his chest and tell him that they'd wait out the first rays of sunlight together, but Quentin stood up instead. As nice as it would be to go on enjoying this closeness, he had a job to do.

"Now, we need to find which of these flagstones is loose. Story goes that after his- well, I guess his and his daughter's -little killing spree-"

"-Mr. Bradshaw hid a body part from each family member under the cellar foundation." Peter interrupted. "Yeah. How does that help us, though?"

Fishing around his pockets, Quentin found the tea candle and lighter he kept on him for just such lightless occasions. He had to flick the lighter a few times to find, then catch the wick, but once he had they had a tiny light source.

"Remains are what spirits cling most strongly to." Quentin said, holding the little candle between them. "They can get attached to objects or people too, but your best bet to get rid of them is to salt and burn any remains you can find."

Peter took the candle after Quentin lit a second off the first wick.

"So we find the right flagstone, find their remains..."

"Salt, burn, bye bye Bradshaw bunch."

They set off with purpose, moving in opposite directions while remaining within each other's direct line of sight. It became quickly apparent that while the pinpricks of light the tea candles offered were comforting, they weren't of much practical help. Quentin began to kick at the stones with his heel, dropping into a crouch whenever one felt different to search for a loose edge with his fingers. He'd hold his candle high, so if Peter turned to look for him, he'd see it.

This went on for... a _while_. The initial drive to find the right stone and complete their quest dwindled with each passing minute. Peter had knocked into something on his side of the room, sworn colorfully, then spent a few minutes grumbling. Quentin was sure he had a few bruises of his own on his shins and elbows, having knocked into who knew what in the darkness.

Finally, the silence was beginning to get to him. They'd heard nothing from upstairs since taking shelter in the cellar, which was more disconcerting than it was comforting. Who even knew why the Bradshaw's weren't following them down here.

"So." Quentin said into the silence, striking up conversation like lighting a match. "Why the fascination with the supernatural, Peter?"

Quentin expected an immediate answer, most people had a lot to say about their passions, but Peter stayed silent. He paused and looked over at the young man, just to be sure he was there and not possessed or something.

He wasn't. In the faint glow of the candle, Quentin could see a frown on his pretty face. It was possible he was biting his cheek, or one side of his bottom lip.

After almost a minute had passed, he said;

"My parents were killed. When I was little."

Oh. Quentin winced to himself. Well, shit.

Peter kicked a flagstone. Then, he kicked it again, harder, and Quentin stopped his own search to look at him again. The frown was more pronounced, now.

"Suspicious circumstances." Peter continued. "Every story I've heard about it has been different. I got my hands on the police file-"

"Impressive."

"Thanks. But it wasn't much help. And, like, I don't know."

Peter shuffled over to another stone and kicked again, still staring at his feet.

"Once you've eliminated the improbable, what's left is the impossible, right? Somewhere I got in my head that maybe what killed them hadn't been human and I just couldn't shake the thought."

The tiny light in Peter's hand didn't cast enough of a glow for Quentin to get a good idea of his posture, but from what he could see of his shoulders, there was no depressed slump. They were a tensed, rigid line. He looked frustrated.

"It might not have been monsters." Quentin pointed out. "Plenty of humans get away with murder every day."

"I know." Peter said.

He turned, looking at Quentin from across the cellar, the flickering orange flame reflected in his eyes. The sparks of light looked like they belonged there.

"But ghosts exist," he continued. "And I bet all sorts of other horrible stuff does too. So how do I know it wasn't one of them?"

And Quentin thought; fair point.

Conversation lapsed into another prolonged silence as they steadily continued their search. The tea candles were liquid wax now and dwindling fast. They'd need to light new ones soon, which would necessitate at least Peter losing his place in order to retrieve a second candle.

Just as Quentin was beginning to consider calling the whole thing off, Peter called his name sharply from the back left corner of the cellar.

"I think I found it!"

A familiar shot of adrenaline quickened Quentin's heartbeat. After so many years hunting, all it took was the thought of the job being almost done to get his body revved into fight or flight mode. That was useful in life or death situations, but not so much when he had to carefully pick his way across a packed cellar in the dark.

With several more bruises-to-be to show for his haste, Quentin arrived at Peter's side. Together, they crouched down, setting their candles aside to seek out the edges of the flagstone.

It was loose. On the count of three, they lifted together and heaved the heavy panel up, away from the dirt foundation.

Their dying candles didn't offer enough light to make anything out. Quentin retrieved his lighter from the inside of his jacket and flicked it to life, holding it low over the dirt. He guided the light slowly around the square of earth, searching.

"Peter," he said, after several moments. "What was supposed to be under here?"

"Uhh."

Beside him, Peter frowned thoughtfully. He held up a loose fist and began to tick things off on his fingers.

" 's tongue, her sister's eyes, an ear from each daughter and the baby's..." he grimaced. "Heart, I think?"

Quentin groaned and dropped his head into his palm. Then he said; "_Fuck me_," because it was just turning into that kind of day.

"What?" Peter asked sharply. "What's wrong?"

"That," Quentin sighed. "Is _way_ too specific."

He dragged his hand down his face and glared at the empty plot of dirt. Not one thing was going right with this hunt. His information going in had been faulty, his understanding of the case was apparently lacking, and the one night in the last four weeks the house became active some damn kids went wandering in. Absolutely nothing had been accomplished.

Except saving Peter. He'd done that. Peter was alive and breathing beside him, shaken but resolved to make it through what remained of this hellish night. That counted for something; it counted for _a lot_.

Peter shifted his weight, leaning over the dirt as if to examine it himself, despite their dying light.

"Specific is bad?" he asked.

"Stories change as they're passed from person to person. Urban legends tend to be more fiction with a kernel of truth to them, but the Bradshaw murders were recent. Their story is still probably pretty close to what was published in the local news, and there's no way they would have released details like those body parts."

"But we found the flagstone."

"Yeah." Quentin nodded. "Someone else probably found it before us and thought it would make a good addition to the story."

It could have been anyone. A cop on the original case, an explorer who happened to show up during one of the house's quiet periods. Hell, maybe someone had just made a lucky guess and the loose flagstone was a coincidence. What mattered was that that portion of the story was bogus.

Quentin stood abruptly. He began pacing, going over his memories of the brownstone floor by floor. A hand swept through his hair, pushing flyaway locks back from his forehead.

What had he missed? _Something_ had to have been overlooked. The Bradshaw family were all cremated, even Bradshaw Sr. Yet he and his homicidal daughter remained. So what was tethering them there? How could they still be killing with their remains already burned?

"Peter." Quentin said, rounding sharply on his companion. "Did you see anything strange when you were on the third floor?"

It was the only floor Quentin hadn't been able to search fully. If there was something, it had to be up there.

Peter stood and crossed his arms. Quentin's pendant swung gently with his movements, hypnotizing in the darkness.

"You mean besides the ghost trying to kill me?"

"Cut the sarcasm, kid, I'm being serious."

"So am I!"

Quentin crossed the space between them in three strides, coming to a stop right before Peter. He gripped his biceps, forcing himself not to squeeze down as tightly as he would with someone he was trying to intimidate. Scaring Peter wasn't the goal here.

"Think, Peter." he said. "I need you to _think_. Was there anything out of place? Anything that struck you as odd? Something that gave you a bad vibe?"

The first of the two tea lights flickered out beside them. Peter held Quentin's gaze. He took in a breath that expanded his chest and lifted his shoulders, then closed his eyes.

The second tea light died and once more they stood in darkness. Only the glow of the pendant remained between them.

"I kept having to move rooms." Peter murmured, his eyes still closed. "I ran up the stairs. I don't know how many rooms I hid in. Everything was a wreck."

A shiver tore through him, shaking his whole body. Quentin squeezed down on his biceps gently. The trembling stilled.

Peter lifted his head, eyes open.

"The third floor. The master bedroom was up there. I wasn't in there long, but I remember this... weird _stain_ on the floor. I don't know why I noticed it."

"A stain." Quentin repeated. "On a rug?"

"No, the wood."

"How big?"

"I don't know. It looked huge. I got out of there fast, I didn't really..." Peter hesitated before finishing; "I didn't want to step on it."

Quentin let Peter go and took a step back.

Staining finished wood wasn't easy. It would take a lot of liquid, left sitting for a _long_ time. Most murders of the modern age were discovered and cleaned fairly quickly, but he couldn't remember a timeline being mentioned in the articles about the Bradshaw murders.

If more than a week had passed with the family going undiscovered, their blood could have seeped directly into the floorboards. He'd seen spirits stick around off less.

Once again, Quentin sighed and ran a hand down his face.

"Alright," he said. "There's good news and bad news."

"Bad news first."

"I can't get rid of dear Daddy Bradshaw and his Satan spawn from here."

"You are _not_ going back up there!" Peter's voice had gotten shrill.

Quentin shook his head, but he wasn't sure Peter saw it. He reached out and found his hand, giving it a quick squeeze to reassure him.

"I'm not." he agreed. "Which is where the good news comes in. They go dormant when the sun comes up. And for whatever reason, they won't come down here. So all we have to do is wait them out, get out of here, and I can take care of the rest."

Peter let out a shaky sigh and squeezed his hand fiercely.

"Whatever you need to do, I want to help."

His voice was steady. Even in the pitch black cellar of the house that had nearly killed him, Peter held fast to his composure. Quentin smiled at him, even though he couldn't see.

He was proud of Peter. Though he'd only met him a few hours prior, he was _proud_ of him.

"You got it, kid."

The digital watch read half past four in the morning. Another hour and a half would pass before dawn even crested the horizon, and another hour after that before the sun was fully in the sky.

* * *

The Bradshaw brownstone burned like a woodfire oven, red-hot flames bursting through the remaining windows, but otherwise contained within the brickwork.

They watched it burn together, bodies, ghosts and all, Quentin leaned against the nose of his car and Peter sat on the hood.

It had been a long night, the hours between four and dawn the longest of all. With nothing to search for and nothing after them, the hours had dragged on in what had felt like an endless malaise of timelessness.

Despite that liminal space-like feeling, their time in the cellar had been almost enjoyable.

They had picked their way around in the darkness and settled beneath one of the two high windows. Quentin still had his hand around Peter's and when they sat, shoulder to shoulder, Peter didn't pull away. He had laced his soft fingers through Quentin's calloused ones and held on, choosing the first conversation topic to come to mind and running with it.

Time had passed unhurriedly. Quentin talked about his car, about hunting, about the pendant still resting around Peter's neck. Peter played with their fingers, using his other hand to trace scars along the back of Quentin's palm and over his weathered knuckles. He talked about photography, about his aunt who sent him money for housing and food from across the country, and about loneliness.

It was something they found they had in common, loneliness. A solitary life they'd found comfort in once, now beginning to suffocate them.

Joined hands became Quentin's arm around Peter, their legs pressed together thigh-to-ankle, Peter's warm breath on his jaw. Quentin had turned his head and spoken into Peter's hair, talking about killing and monsters and the scars it left on his soul. Peter called him brave. Quentin had thrown the compliment right back at him.

When the watch finally read seven o'clock, they'd left the cellar.

Hands locked together, Quentin had led them back out through the kitchen, down the hall and through the entryway. The smell of smoke lingered in the air. He hadn't paused to consider the other boys' bodies.

As soon as their feet hit the concrete outside the Bradshaw house, both Quentin and Peter breathed in deeply. The air was crisp and clean, still heavy with the miasma of evil behind them, but separate from it somehow. Freer. The danger had passed. The nightmare was over.

Almost.

Quentin's car wasn't parked far away. He'd had no competition for a parking spot, as the horror of the Bradshaw murders had driven the surrounding neighborhood into near-desertion.

In his trunk, he had all the fixings to make a crate's worth of molotov cocktails. He had shown Peter how to make them, walking him through the steps one at a time. It wasn't hard to do. Peter had picked it up in no time.

They'd taken an armful each and set them on the sidewalk at their feet. Quentin had held up the lighter to Peter's first bottle, lit the rag and watched as he chucked it as hard as he could through the open front door. It shattered and the fire spread, suddenly and violent, eating into the wood flooring with gusto.

The amount of cocktails they threw may have been overkill. At some point, Quentin stopped tossing them and just stood by as Peter lit and threw, the firelight dancing over his skin in the early morning sunshine.

Then they'd sat back and watched. Were still watching.

A window on the third floor finally blew as the fire spread across the last landing.

"You think that got them?" Peter asked.

"The whole place is a chimney." Quentin said. "The fire can only go up."

He glanced to the side and met Peter's eye. Then, he smiled.

"Yeah. We got them."

Peter nodded and then looked back at the burning building.

The fire department was taking their sweet time responding. Whether it was because no one had noticed the blaze, or just that no one had bothered to call it in, he wasn't sure. Maybe what was left of the neighborhood were all breathing a sigh of relief as the oppressive feeling of evil was purged.

Quentin couldn't stay forever. Though the fire was transfixing, beautiful in its own macabre way, he wouldn't be able to stay long enough to see it burn out. Even ignored, word of the blaze would reach the authorities eventually. Quentin would need to be gone before then.

His mind wandered to what the aftermath of the previous night would look like to first responders. What would they think after they finally managed to put out the blaze, when they found three twice-burned corpses inside? Was there enough left to identify? Would their cause of death still be evident?

In his experience, even if an autopsy found the myriad of injuries he'd seen on the luckless teens, those details would be carefully omitted from the official record. No one would know how to explain a missing heart, a severed leg, missing eyes or countless broken bones. They wouldn't want to think about it.

Funerals would be held. Parents would cry. Closed caskets would be lowered into the earth. And then everyone would politely forget the whole miserable thing, because that was safer than exploring the truth.

"Can you teach me?"

Quentin turned his head. Peter kept staring into the burning brownstone, expression unreadable.

"About what?"

"All of it." Peter said. "What you do. What's out there. How to stop it."

"My sticking around is a bad idea. I'll probably be out of town by noon today."

"Then take me with you."

When Peter dragged his eyes from the inferno, they'd lost their weary gloss. The set of his mouth was grim, his brow pinched with determination. A hand rested on his camera, still slung around his neck, like it was an anchor.

"I haven't got anything keeping me here." he said. "Nothing worth sticking around for. Not after that."

When the bodies were identified, the police would figure out that Peter had been with them. If he disappeared, they might think him guilty, but more likely they'd just think him dead. Lost to the fire.

"Hunting's not something you start on lightly, kid." Quentin said. "Once you get started, you don't get out again. Most of us die young and bloody."

"But you take things like the Bradshaws down with you."

Quentin nodded.

"We do."

Peter's hand had moved from his camera to Quentin's pendant. He had yet to offer it back to its owner, but by the same token, Quentin had yet to ask for it back. His thumb rubbed over the engraved stone.

"Take me with you." he repeated. "I want to learn to hunt like you."

A better man would tell him no. But Quentin grinned, wolfish and wild, and shoved off the front of the car.

"Get in, kid. We can swing by your place and then get the hell out of dodge."


End file.
